The future of diagnostics is in the hands of those taking care of the biospecimen samples says, Andy Brooks our final guest in the series, Improving Biospecimen Standards. Andy is the Chief Operating Officer at Rutgers University Cell and DNA Repository, or RUCDR.

While acknowledging that the current state of tissue sample collection, handling and storage is “pretty bad,” Andy points to areas where progress has been made. And he would know. RUCDR serves as the biorepository for 4 NIH institutes. A biobank such as RUCDR is a unique place where various segments of biomedical research—academia, industry, regulation-- come together.

Andy was at the convergence summit put together last December by Carolyn Compton and the National Biomarker Development Alliance (see our interview with Carolyn here) to develop some standards in this area. While he’s excited to see Carolyn rally the community and bring CAP and the FDA on board, he sounds a warning.

“There’s only so much you can do to standardize samples at the time of collection and control for variables, some of which are uncontrollable," he says.

So what can be done?

Andy and his colleagues at RUCDR have made important strides toward developing what one of our former guests called a "tissue quality index,” a score that will tell you whether a sample in storage is what you think it is. While they don’t have an overall score yet, Andy and his team have worked with companies like Fluidigm and Wafergen to develop a panel that measures the quality of some analytes and can predict the performance of a sample.

We end the interview with Andy’s thoughts on the future of genomic consent.